Always Prepared
by Lorata
Summary: Lyme has aced every test the District 2 Career training program has tossed at her, but there are a few they haven't tried yet. Turns out the murder is the easy part.


One afternoon a trainer calls Lyme out of group drills and asks her to show them her hand-to-hand. Lyme drags an arm over her forehead to wipe away the sweat, runs her fingers back through her hair and drags her hands down the sides of her uniform. "Objective?" she asks. Sometimes there isn't one, they pretend they just want to see her fight, but that's rare. Usually there's something they're looking for, and it wastes less time if they tell her outright.

"Not today," the trainer says, and fine, be that way. She waves over another trainer, a young guy, one of the new recruits from last year fresh out of the Program, then stands back with her clipboard.

Lyme eyes the new guy, nineteen years old with lean muscles and pretty features. Pretty enough that Lyme notices, which sets off a strange fire in her midsection and makes her want to slam him into a wall and break his face. Or something. Lyme loosens her stance, waiting for him to make a move, but he hangs back in the ready position, doing the same.

It's the worst game, the waiting, but Lyme is not about to let some cocky trainer who thinks he can outlast her win the contest. She's big and brawny and looks like she has a temper (not untrue), and that means one of the first tactics people try with her is to get her to blow her stack and lose control. Too bad for him, though, Lyme's more patient than she looks, and she's happy to wait him out.

At least — until he winks.

Lyme can handle the trainers shouting, the tongue-clicks of disappointment when she comes in over her last time; even the mocking comments thrown at them during matches to mess with her concentration bounce off her like a mis-aimed knife. But the wink, complete with a shit-eating grin that says how pleased with himself he is, like he thinks he's all that and Lyme should be grateful to go up against him — fuck _that_.

She launches herself at him and takes him down, but he's slippery and gets out from under her at the last second. Lyme scrambles back, gets her footing and attacks again, and he might be a trainer but she's bigger and heavier and all she has to do is use her weight against him —

He slides both hands up her arms, palms skidding in the sweat on her skin, and Lyme tenses in case he's planning to dig in his fingernails or flip her over but he doesn't. Instead he grins, and he shifts position with his legs to get his knee between hers except he doesn't throw her then either, and what is he _doing_?

Lyme's brain has spun in confused circles for a good ten seconds when she pieces it together, and even then it's only when he runs one foot up the back of her calf. Lyme wrenches her arms free and scrambles back with a burst of profanity, trainer presence be damned, and when he tries to follow Lyme gets him down and around with his face in the mats and one arm twisted up behind his back.

"That's enough," says the other, and Lyme jerks her head up. She'd forgotten the audience, and this must be some sort of test except _what the hell_. "You passed, but watch that anger. That's the kind that makes you sloppy."

Lyme lets go and pushes herself to her feet. The trainer follows, shaking out his arm with a rueful expression. "What was that?" she demands. Blood pounds in her ears, and the rage twitches inside her, itching to explode out. Bad enough that a trainer hit on her while another one watched, but worse is that while Lyme does not have a type, she doesn't all right, if she did it would be him. How did they know, and what the _fuck_ is the idea?

The trainer taps her clipboard with her pen. "How exactly were you planning to react when you fight 1M and he tries that on you?" she asks.

Lyme gapes. "Break his fingers."

"And while you're kicking in his skull, his district partner — or even better, one of the outliers who's been following in the shadows — sneaks up and gets a knife in your back." She raises her eyebrows. "Flirting through a fight isn't the most subtle technique a tribute has used to win, but it's One's staple for a reason. You need to learn how to prepare against it."

Lyme fights the urge to scrape her fingernails down her arms to remove the feeling of the trainer's hands. It helps a little to know he did it under orders, but not much. "How about I just kill 1M at the Cornucopia then, and save us all the trouble?"

For that Lyme gets a Look, though at least she expected that. Keeping the Pack in tact as long as possible is a standard tactic, and Lyme doesn't have any fresh tricks up her sleeve to keep things interesting if she breaks the pattern. "Your appearance will make you a target," the trainer says, and Lyme grits her teeth but that's a fair point. The Games skew pretty, like it or not, and anyone who's not has an automatic disadvantage. "Chances are both the Ones are going to flirt with you to see if they can get under your skin. They might even bet on it, keep things interesting for the cameras. If you let them get to you then it's just as bad as falling for the seduction in the first place."

Lyme clicks her tongue but can't find a counter-argument. "Fine," she says, and the trainer nods. She's allowed to question as long as she accepts the answer, and so far nobody in the Centre has ever let her down so far. Forty years with at least three Victors per decade can't be spouting complete bullshit. A sudden thought occurs to her, and Lyme cocks her head. "You said I passed. What counts as a fail?"

The trainer coughs to hide a grin, and Lyme sputters out a laugh before she can stop herself. "Wait, you mean some of us actually —"

"And then they lose, yes." The trainer taps her pen against her clipboard. "You're all young, and we're not stupid. We train you the way we do for a reason."

"I guess so." Lyme shakes her head, nearly laughs all over again at the thought of the unfortunate trainers whose targets take the bait and decide to go for it. This probably counts as a hazing ritual for the new recruits. "Should we go again?"

The trainer she took down rolls his shoulder and winces. "I'm out," he says, and Lyme can't hide her grin.

* * *

A month later, they call her in and tell her they need to see her kiss one of the boys.

"You're fucking joking," Lyme says in a deadpan, though why she bothers who even knows. The trainers haven't joked about an assignment since she was eight. "That's not my angle. I'm not doing it."

It would be Skylar, too, grinning toothily and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Lyme glares at him but he only winks right back, and why oh why does the Capitol insist on fake romances? Can't they just get off on bloodshed like normal people?

The trainer raises an eyebrow, but Lyme doesn't back down. She let the image trainers strip her down and put her in dresses, paint her face with makeup and stick her in horrible high heels, and she may have gritted her teeth but she never spoke a word of complaint. They can damn well throw her a bone on this one.

"You know your angle, do you?" the trainer says in a mild tone that means 'watch it'. "You can predict exactly what the audience will want to see in two years? Know what your mentor is going to tell you to do?"

Lyme exhales through her nose. "I think there are enough Careers in the Pack that someone else can do the making out and leave the killing to me," she spits out, just this shy of insubordination.

"Suit yourself." The trainer lifts one shoulder and lets it drop. "You're not the only girl with high scores, and for everything you refuse on principle there are two other candidates willing to do exactly what's asked of them."

That, unfortunately, is not an exaggeration. But it was one thing to fight a trainer pretend to seduce her so she could learn how to get away without losing her focus; it's something else to be expected to kiss someone else and get scored on how much it looks like she means it.

Especially Skylar, who has hit on Lyme since they joined Residential and seems to find broken bones the opposite of a deterrent.

Lyme's throat tightens, and she digs her nails into her palms to try to keep steady. She's given them everything, three dead animals and five dead humans and hours and hours of her time to be here, and she'll give even more before she's anywhere near the Arena. They've starved her, shocked her, half-drowned her; locked her in cupboards and gassed her and left her to trek up the mountainside in winter with nothing but a backpack. She'd rather do all that again than let Skylar kiss her.

The trainer's expression softens, just a little, and just like that Lyme can't take it anymore. If the trainer feels sorry for her — it's their job to break her and mould her stronger, not coddle and protect her — then she'll never make it. It's a test, that's all it is, and Lyme hasn't failed one yet. She'll never be able to let Skylar or anyone else kiss her without every muscle twitching in protest, but maybe _letting_ is the part of the equation she's getting wrong.

Lyme stalks forward, and before Skylar can react she grabs him by the front of the shirt, slams him hard into the wall, and kisses him hard enough it hurts.

She likes boys, she's pretty sure, or at least her body does. She's tried this with other girls in her year and felt nothing but frustration at the strangeness of it, but Lyme has imagined kissing boys a few times alone in her room with the lights off and the blankets pulled up to her chin and no one but the darkness as a witness, and that — well. She never dwells on it too long because it all gets tangled up in her head, the kissing and the violence, and she ends up turned on and itching for blood and the whole thing is an extra layer of confusion she doesn't need when any misstep means failure.

Skylar flails and kisses back, fighting to take control but it's too late. He's never bested her in sparring and he doesn't now; Lyme twists her hand into his hair and pulls hard, pins his sword arm over his head and keeps him trapped between her and the wall. The whole time Lyme keeps her attention divided between Skylar's free hand — in case he goes for a weapon or her ribs — and the trainers to see if anyone is moving against her, and the blood pounds hot in her ears and her heart hammers and it shouldn't feel like this but it does.

Finally Lyme pulls away, shoving Skylar back with a contemptuous gesture, and she turns to the trainer and gives her a challenging stare. "Well?"

Skylar gawks at her, rubbing his arm with a glassy-eyed expression, and right now Lyme swears she could jump from the roof and get up without a scratch. She could take on the biggest, oldest trainer twice her size and snap his neck with her bare hands. She wants to try all of it, wants to see if she can make it to the top of the rock wall only using one hand; wants to run laps until her feet leave the ground and she soars to the ceiling; wants to grab the nearest pretty boy and — well, never mind.

"Good," the trainer calls, and Lyme recognizes when someone is trying not to laugh, but she's laughing at Skylar and not at Lyme and the triumph flares higher. Then trainer turns to Skylar and says, "You have some work to do," and he storms off in a shaky-legged huff and that only makes it better.

The excess energy makes Lyme jittery; the trainer gives her a once-over, and for a second she thinks she's going to be told to run laps to burn it off but no. "The gauntlet for you," the trainer says, amused, and Lyme holds her head up and flashes a wolf's smile because why not? Bring it on.

The trainers pit her against ten opponents right after another with no rest between one victory and the next, and Lyme makes it all the way through. By the end she's bruised, bleeding and exhausted, but she spots Skylar on her way to Medical and he actually skirts around and takes another path, and _ha_!.

Lyme laughs to herself all the way through the doctors setting her broken fingers, and that night at dinner she makes sure to sit in Skylar's eye line. She catches his gaze, winks, and bites into the fresh apple they gave her with wicked gusto.


End file.
